Whenever Mike Connery would drive with his wife and kids from their home in Brunswick to Pineland Farms, he’d marvel at the number of roadside stands they’d pass along the way, selling everything from goat cheese to lavender — and lots of eggs.

They were impossibly cute and “something we were not used to seeing,” said Connery, who moved to Maine from New Jersey in 2020, when he and his wife started working remotely, in IT and HR, respectively.

Initially, he thought they would make for a great coffee table book, but as it became a bit of game to look for them wherever they went, Connery realized that people like him might appreciate having a map of them.

Nailing down the number and location of farm stands in Maine is nearly impossible. Because of Maine’s food sovereignty laws, many stands don’t need any sort of permit to operate. While there are maps of Maine’s farms and farmers markets that include farm stands, there didn’t appear to be one specifically for these roadside operations that people like Connery love to discover.

Short of driving every road in the state to find them, the best bet for collecting information on farm stands could only be through crowdsourcing, and that’s just what Connery did.

He had been using Facebook as a resource for help with the hobby farm he started at his house and decided to turn there again this spring to solicit information on stands throughout the state.

He heard from people about spots from Skowhegan to Steuben, many with quirky names, selling vegetables, herbs, firewood, honey, bagels, pickles, sweets, soap and, again, a lot of eggs.

Connery spent a weekend building the Farmstands Guide website (found at farmstandsguide.com), with a form for anyone to add their own stand. It now has more than 100 listings and averages 300 users a month.

His project comes during a surge of interest in farm stands sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time people were looking for places other than large supermarkets to purchase food, farms needed new customers to replace the restaurants and institutions that had put a pause on their orders, said Sarah Alexander, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

While it’s hard say whether the number of farm stands has grown because of that, a survey MOFGA took in 2023 showed that more farmers believed on-farm sales would become important to their business in the next five years compared with any other channel, including farmers markets, small stores and CSAs.

In addition, the number of home food licenses issued by the state — for people to make things like the baked goods, jams and pickles often sold at farm stands and markets — has increased by 13% in just the past year, according to data provided by the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry.

The number of farm stands on Connery’s radar has certainly grown, including some right around the corner from his house that he wasn’t aware existed.

Although he doesn’t have his own stand yet, he did discover a different side hustle for himself in the process: making farm stands their own websites.